This episode was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation on spreading love through the media. I played for the national team for 15 years and I loved playing for this country. I love that Suiting Up in and of itself was a protest and a disruption of the way that we normally experience sport, right? And every single time I would be getting a gold medal around my neck and the anthem would play. And I would have this couple of minutes of just sheer joy.
And I would step off the podium, I would look to my teammate to my right or left, and I'd say, I want to do that again. In the pursuit of excellence, in the pursuit of winning, in the pursuit of gold medals and championships, That was always my North Star, this idea of extraordinary existence. And after many championships and after literally winning the FIFA World's Best Player of the Year award in the whole world, I thought that this was going to be the thing.
that brought me nirvana or enlightenment. And I go back into my hotel room that night. I'm looking in the mirror, hoping to find something different, hoping to find something worthy. hoping to feel more lovable or beloved in some way. And I just felt the same. And I was just really afraid that the life that I had spent my whole life
life up until this point doing and exploring wasn't going to give me the thing that I kind of anticipated. It wasn't going to give me the truth of myself and the truth of what I think life is about. Welcome to the Science of Happiness. I'm Dr. Keltner. Today, it's an honor to be joined by two-time World Olympic gold medalist, FIFA world champion, and if that's not enough, best-selling author, Abby Wambach.
Abby joins us today to share how they've turned struggle into triumph and how honesty and self-love are antidotes to all the shame so many of us carry. More after this break. How much awe and wonder do you experience in your life? From the John Templeton Foundation, our sponsors at the Science of Happiness, the Templeton Ideas Podcast explores the most awe-inspiring ideas in our world with the people who investigate them.
Host Tom Burnett sits down with inspiring thinkers like Alison Gopnik, David Brooks, Tyler Cowens, and Gretchen Rubin. to discuss how their investigations have transformed their lives and how they may transform yours. Learn more at templeton.org podcast.
Welcome back to the Science of Happiness. I'm Dr. Keltner. And today it's an honor to be joined by Abby Wambach. Abby's new book is an inspiration and it's so timely today. It's called We Can Do Hard Things. Also the name of the podcast she co-hosts with her wife. journalist Glennon Doyle, and sister Amanda Doyle. Thanks so much for joining us, Abby, to the Science of Happiness. It's really a pleasure to be here. I'm just curious to get a sense of what inspired you to move.
from being an Olympic athlete and a gold medalist and somebody at the top of a very hard field. And suddenly you want to take us on this journey into facing life's challenges. What took you to that place? The why of it all is I... really struggled towards the end of my soccer career with alcoholism and prescription pain medicine addiction to be playing like in order to get out on the field i needed meds yeah
I was basically hitting rock bottom. I'm nine years sober today. Congratulations. Thank you. It's been the most life-altering, beautiful experience of my life is to tackle the challenges that come day after day.
remain present and sober for all of it. I wanted to ask you about a couple of hard things, and I want to applaud you, Abby. You know, the science of happiness has been late to encouraging people to really... think about the meaning we derive from hard things our culture doesn't do a good job of it one hard thing is just being so open about
substance abuse and sharing your insights. Here you are, one of the world's great athletes, and yet you struggle with that. And what was that like for you? There's a vibe in the sports world. that we are infallible, that our bodies are machines. We are the gods, right? Our bodies are the gods. Yet there's so little conversation around mental health.
and what we're actually experiencing. I think that I was probably correctly responding to my environment and my ecosystem because it is... unnatural for a human body to go into an arena-like event, a stadium, where thousands and thousands of people are calling your name, are screaming for you.
I understand now why it was really hard for me to settle down after games. Why it was hard for my brain chemistry to come back to some level of homeostasis. So after... games i would feel a little depressed i'd feel a little down i couldn't sleep at night all of these symptoms would start showing up and so the way that i learned when i was growing up to
bring homeostasis into my brain chemistry oh we'll just add some alcohol to this right like oh we'll just we'll add a sleeping medication to this oh well and so i was outsourcing all of my mental stability to these outside things. I had a lot of shame around it. You know, I was really in the closet about my addiction. I didn't want anybody to know because then it complicates this.
godlike thing that I had developed and built as a professional athlete. A couple months after I retired, I got a DUI and my mugshot was on the ESPN ticker for like a week straight. that really was the thing that did it for me that was very hard i was writing a book a memoir about my life and i was trying to decide if i should include the dui in the memoir
And as soon as I included that, I got to start living in the real world. To not worry about something coming out or somebody telling my secret in the world. And I decided at that point, OK, I'm just going to live out loud. I'm going to live openly. I'm not going to worry if people don't like it. I'm not going to worry about that stuff because. I have to be myself first and foremost, and I can't pretend to be something that I'm not. You use the word shame and, you know, Brene Brown.
Drawing upon the science of shame, shame clouds your mind and leads to self-doubt. There's work on how it actually inflames the body. What did you learn about shame and how did you learn to navigate its... really vicious grip on people. I have experienced it a lot. I grew up Catholic. Our parents raised us Catholic. And I'm sure a lot of people have heard the phrase Catholic guilt, right? Oh, yeah.
And the exploration of that has really allowed me to get deeper into the relationship with the questions around why am I like this? Because there's so much of our upbringing. that we didn't have a ton of control over. You know, when you're a child or a young adult even, your parents are running the ship. And back in the 80s and 90s when I grew up, there wasn't the mentality around parenting that...
allowed for parents to ask their children what they thought about things and what they believed in. I think things are definitely changing a little bit more now. But I was really worried when I was... a young teenager, because I'd sat in the pews of those Catholic churches my whole life, and I really was drinking the Kool-Aid around what queerness meant.
to the Catholic world and the religious world. And so, of course, as I start to become who I am as a queer young kid in this country, I have to make this conscious choice. at least this is the way that I kind of thought about it at the time, I have to decide, I have to choose between my mother's love, God, or myself. Wow. That's what I thought. And I went on kind of a little bit of a rebellious streak for a few years in my college. I didn't talk to my mom for like a year because...
I knew that she wasn't going to accept me, and I just didn't want to broach the conversations. I didn't want to come out. It was scarier back then to come out as a queer person. And I just remember feeling like... Oh, okay, I'm going to just be myself and be gay. I'm going to go over here and try to prove my love to my mom through this, like, soccer excellence.
And then I'm also just going to carry around this internalized homophobia within myself forever. And I'll just carry this shame with me. And... That's what I decided to carry with me forever. And so you wonder then, all of these things start to pop up, alcoholism and prescription drug abuse. And oh, when you drop back to these little...
really impactful things that we put our children in front of. That really was life-altering for me. And still, to this day, it is work that I have to consistently come back to. It's this internalized homophobia that, oh, am I safe here? Am I going to go to hell or to heaven? And in fact, just recently, my brother passed away a year and a half ago.
And his name is Peter. And my wife told me this incredible story because she's very, she's not religious, I would say. She's spiritual. And she knows a lot about all the religions. And she said to me, Abby, do you know? who saint peter was and i said no i don't she said well saint peter was one of jesus's best friends and your brother's name is peter and what jesus did is he gave saint peter the keys to heaven
And so St. Peter is literally your brother. Now he's in heaven and is essentially the bouncer for heaven. So... The spiritual bouncer for heaven. And so when you think about your brother Peter, do you think he's going to let you into heaven? And I just wept. Wow. Up next, Abby shares what's at the core of what makes doing hard things possible. More than anything, the antidote, I think, to shame is self-love. The antidote of anything is self-love.
Here at LifeKit, NPR's self-help podcast, we love the idea of helping you make meaningful lifestyle changes. Our policy? Don't be too punishing on yourself or too grand in your goals, which is why we've got shows on how to help you make little nudges to your behavior and create habits that stick. Join LifeKit to get the tools you need. Listen to the Life Kit podcast from NPR. Welcome back to the Science of Happiness. We've been talking with Abby Wambach about how to do hard things.
And now we're turning to what makes that possible, self-love. In this era of perfectionism, Self-love is hard to find. Self-compassion is hard to find. Self-acceptance. And we know, you know, when you think about all the toxic effects of shame on the brain and body, self-love, acceptance, it just helps. calm anxiety, reduce depression, handle hardship better, find meaning in it. How did you, coming out of this really complicated early life, how did you find it? I am a person who
has struggled for the most of my life to experience the feeling of self-love. Up until about a year and a half ago, I probably would have said, I don't know what you mean when you say, Self-love. I know hard work. I know work ethic. I know achieving things. I know going for your goal. I know having purpose. But I don't know the functions of...
how to experience the feeling of really loving yourself. I'm the youngest of seven kids and having a family dynamic of being in like utter controlled chaos. almost my entire life that's really hard on a nervous system i didn't understand that until more recently And it's also really difficult because one of your main objectives as a person in that environment of nine people, two parents, seven kids, is your whole job is to not rock the boat.
You don't say a ton. And if you do, it's nothing that's going to tip the scale one way or the other. So what that has created and built inside of me is this people-pleasing mechanism where... When somebody crosses a boundary of mine, I have very rarely stuck up for myself. And when you get into this pattern of not saying the thing that is important.
or not saying you've crossed a boundary and I need to talk to you about it, then you actually aren't developing a self-respect, which I think ultimately leads to this. concept, at least at the time, of feeling love for yourself. More than anything, the antidote, I think, to shame is self-love. The antidote of anything is self-love. And I love your quoting of the writer Ocean Belong, who says, we don't survive by accident. It's a creative act.
And your book, We Can Do Hard Things, is a creative act you're offering to our world. And so I have to ask you, for the kids you're raising and the people you're inspiring. What is Abby Wambach's Creative Guide to Survival? What would you say, like, these are the tenets that you have to embody in your life? Okay, I'm going to answer this honestly and truthfully.
When I got to the top of the mountains in soccer, and I realized that there is probably no there there, the extraordinary, I started to focus my attention on the ordinary. I have a family with my wife. We have three children. And I made a commitment to myself when I got sober that all of the decisions that I made going forward, no matter what they were about, had to be based in love.
And I know that that sounds so, I don't know, privileged and basic. But if you were to strip everything all the way down to its core, I think that's what I want my life's meaning to be. When I die... I want the people that I love to say that was something that I taught them about. That was something that I showed them, that taking risks for love is beautiful.
that finding love within themselves is the most essential thing in order to be able to find love and likeness and connection with other people. I understand that we live in a weird time right now. And I think connection and the feeling of doing it not alone. So many of us are addicted to our phones, myself included. I mean, all of us have an unhealthy relationship with our...
cellular devices. And it's giving us less reason to connect because we are believing that there is a connection here. But there isn't. So I think that love is the answer for me around that. And I don't know what that means for you. I don't know if that means put your devices away and have a real conversation with somebody about what matters to you.
about your fear of what's going on. Because so much of what's happening, I think, is a siloed effect. We think that we're connected, but we're not. We think we're saying something, but we're not. In order for me to move forward and to build meaning in my life, it has to be foundationally built on love. If I have love at my core and curiosity above that, and then try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Even people that might not see things politically the same as me.
And if you start thinking about really like the foundational questions that we're all swirling around, that we all forget the answers to every single night when we go to sleep, we can start building a life that we feel good about. We can start building community that we feel proud and held by. And so we are not alone. We have to do this together. And I think that we can.
Abby, thank you for your stories of moral beauty. And we're really grateful you took the time to be on our show. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoy talking about all this stuff. It means a lot. Here's an intriguing idea. Looking to the past, to moments of resilience, progress, and care, can actually fuel our hope for the future. Hope can kind of keep us going, like...
What I do matters. We have something to draw on because we've seen evidence of good things. We explore the science of hope on our next episode of the Science of Happiness. Thanks to our associate producers, Emily Brower and Dasha Zarboni. Our producer, Truc Quinn. Our sound designer, Jenny Cataldo of A Company Studios. And our executive producer, Shuka Kalantari. I'm Dacher Keltner. Until next time. Thanks for being part of the Science of Happiness community.